The Miracle at Speedy Motors

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma Ramotswe steered the van past a particularly large hole in the road. “Well, Rra,” she said, “I have always followed a very simple rule in these matters. When I want to find something out, I usually ask somebody directly. That is the best way to get information: you ask for it and it is given to you.”

  Mr. Polopetsi smiled. “But do people always tell you the truth?”

  Mma Ramotswe peered over the top of her steering wheel. “Not always. But then you can tell when they’re telling lies. If you watch people when they talk to you, you can tell.”

  Mr. Polopetsi turned to stare at her, and she met his gaze briefly before looking ahead again at the road. He had looked doubtful, and it occurred to her that this was because of what had happened to him. His experience disproved what she said—he knew that people could not always tell the difference between lies and truth. He had been sent to prison because even a judge, who sits all day and listens to people giving conflicting versions of the truth, even such a person could not tell. Perhaps I claim too much, thought Mma Ramotswe; perhaps I cannot really tell.

  They drove on and were soon passing through the outskirts of the village, past the small white-painted houses dotted here and there, past a herd boy with a line of nibbling goats, past a sign pointing off to a butchery somewhere out in the bush. Then suddenly Mma Ramotswe applied the brakes and brought the tiny white van to a halt.

  “You see that lady?” She pointed to a woman who was sitting in a chair under an acacia tree, just a few yards off the road. Above her, hanging from a branch overhead, but comfortably within reach, was another chair.

  “There is a chair in the tree,” observed Mr. Polopetsi. “I wonder why…”

  “I’m going to ask that lady,” said Mma Ramotswe. “She is doing nothing, and she looks like a lady who knows things.”

  They got out of the van and picked their way across the dusty strip of land that separated them from the woman under her acacia tree.

  “Dumela, Mma.”

  Greetings exchanged, Mma Ramotswe pointed up at the extra chair hanging on the branch above the woman’s head. “It is strange to see a chair in a tree, Mma.”

  The woman looked up, as if seeing the chair for the first time. “Oh, that chair. That is a chair I keep for visitors, Mma. You see, I sell tomatoes here. I have a small stall, but there was a strong wind last week and it blew the stall away. I am sitting here because I have got so used to it.”

  “You could make a new stall, Mma,” said Mr. Polopetsi, gazing up at the chair.

  “I will do that soon,” said the woman, “but not just yet.” She looked down at her lap, where her hands were folded. “My hands are not ready for work yet. They have been working, working, working. Now it is time for my hands to take a rest.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded her head in understanding. There was so much work for women in Africa: fields to be tilled, yards to be swept, clothes to be washed, children to be brought up. That was their lot, and they did it without complaint, without asking the men whether they would care to do some of this work that women did—not all of it, just some. And now here was this woman, her faded skirt cloth wrapped around her waist, taking a short break from all that work, sitting under her tree with the spare chair dangling above her head.

  “I’m sure that your hands deserve a rest,” said Mma Ramotswe, glancing at Mr. Polopetsi as she spoke. He was a hard-working man, of course, but he was the only representative of the world of men present under that tree and so he would have to shoulder some of the blame.

  Mr. Polopetsi shifted on his feet. “Mma Ramotswe is right,” he said. “Your hands surely deserve a rest, Mma. They can go to sleep now.”

  At the mention of Mma Ramotswe’s name, the woman looked up sharply. “Mma Ramotswe? You are Mma Ramotswe?”

  Mma Ramotswe inclined her head briefly and emitted the sibilant ee of the Setswana yes. That yes could be made to sound anything from accepting to wildly enthusiastic. This time it sounded cautious, implying that she might well be Mma Ramotswe, but people should not read too much into that.

  “You are the lady detective?” asked the woman. “The one who has that office behind the garage? That one?”

  “That is who she is,” said Mr. Polopetsi proudly.

  The woman looked briefly at Mr. Polopetsi and then looked away, as if discounting the reliability of any statement he might make. “Is that true, Mma?”

  “It is true,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I may not be the sort of detective you think I am. I am not a lady who deals with criminal business. That is the job of the Botswana police force. They do it very well. I have nothing to do with all that.”

  The woman seemed disappointed. “But you are still a detective?”

  “Yes,” answered Mma Ramotswe. “But I am a lady first and then I am a detective. So I just do the things which we ladies know how to do—I talk to people and find out what has happened. Then I try to solve the problems in people’s lives. That is all I do.”

  “But that is a big thing,” said the woman. “There are many problems in our lives. Big ones sometimes.” She suddenly unfolded her resting hands and gestured in the air to illuminate the immensity of the problems which people faced.

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “Small ones too, Mma Sometimes big problems are really tiny ones when you look at them in the right way.” She glanced again at Mr. Polopetsi. They would have to get back to the subject or she sensed that this woman would talk for rather a long time.

  Mr. Polopetsi came to the rescue. “We are looking for somebody to tell us about a lady who lived in this village,” he said. “She is late now, and her husband is late too. She was called Mma Sebina.”

  The woman, who had been frowning in concentration as he spoke, now smiled broadly. She ignored Mr. Polopetsi, though, addressing her reply to Mma Ramotswe. It was an odd habit, thought Mma Ramotswe, who had noticed. It was the same thing that the younger apprentice did; when answering a question from Mma Makutsi he would look at Mma Ramotswe or Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. It was a way of saying, You don’t really exist for me; not entirely. “But I knew her, Mma,” said the woman. “I knew that lady well. I was her best friend for a long time. A long time.” Her gaze moved from Mma Ramotswe out to the bush beyond, so dry now at this time of the year; no grazing at all for the cattle and slim pickings even for the goats.

  “Your best friend?”

  “She was. I was very sad when she became late, Mma. When your friends die…you know how your heart feels. Like this.” She clenched her right fist tight: the human heart made small.

  Mma Ramotswe was silent for a moment. She had not thought much about Mma Sebina’s mother and what she was like; she had been interested only in finding out about how she had acquired the child all those years ago. But, of course, there would be a person at the end of that inquiry, a person who left others bereft on her passing. That was the trouble with any inquiry; one unravelled one piece of the skein and it revealed so many little strands, each of which was a story in itself.

  She spoke gently. “You must miss her, Mma,” she said. “I know how it is to lose a close friend.”

  The woman inclined her head in acknowledgement.

  “And her daughter, Mma?” Mma Ramotswe continued. “Tell me about her daughter.”

  It took the woman some time to reply, and when she did her tone had changed from regret to something close to anger. “That girl is no good. She was always complaining, complaining, complaining. Like one of those birds that goes on and on all day, telling us that some other bird has stolen its nest or the snake has eaten its eggs. That is what that girl is like.”

  They were a bit taken aback. Mr. Polopetsi lifted a hand to his mouth, as if he himself had suddenly spoken out of turn; Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow, but only just. “I did not know that,” she said. “Perhaps you could tell me about that, Mma.”

  The woman drew in her breath. “Oh, there is a lot to say, Mma. There is so much that I hardly know where to begin. She was an ungrateful girl—ver
y ungrateful. That lady and her husband gave that girl everything. They paid big school fees—big like this—for her to go to school. They bought her pretty dresses and everything she wanted. When she was a little girl I remember her with her mouth full of sweeties all the time. Morning, afternoon. All the time.”

  “And her teeth,” observed Mma Ramotswe, even as she thought, If I had been allowed to have my mouth full of sweeties all the time, how I would have loved it!

  The woman looked blank. “I do not see what that has to do with her teeth, Mma. I have not said anything about her teeth.”

  Mr. Polopetsi intervened. “I think that Mma Ramotswe meant that if her mouth was always full of sweeties, then her teeth would have had many holes in them. Like those places where the rock rabbits live. Those places in the rocks where they make their holes.”

  The woman stared at Mma Ramotswe. “Why is he talking about rock rabbits now, Mma? Can you tell me?”

  Mma Ramotswe exchanged a quick glance with Mr. Polopetsi. He was well meaning, but he did not know that one should try to keep people on track when one was questioning them. Clovis Andersen himself made that point in his chapter on “Getting to the Truth” in The Principles of Private Detection. “Some people,” he wrote, “cannot resist the opportunity to talk about things that have nothing to do with the case. They wander off in all sorts of directions and lose sight of the subject in hand. Don’t fall into the trap of distracting them.”

  “I don’t think it matters much, Mma,” she said soothingly. “I expect that he was thinking of something else. Now, why do you think this girl was ungrateful? If her parents were so kind to her, then why was she ungrateful?”

  The woman reached out and laid a hand on Mma Ramotswe’s forearm. When she answered, she spoke in a low voice, so that Mr. Polopetsi had to lean forward to hear what she said. This made the woman lower her voice even further. “Her parents, you say, Mma. You say her parents. I say her parents. But that girl, she thought that they were not her parents at all! She said that herself. Not to everyone, but she said it to me once, and to another lady who knew her mother. And to a woman in the Women’s Guild at the church. She said it. She said that she came from somewhere else.”

  This revelation was greeted with complete silence. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke. “And was this true, do you think?”

  The woman suddenly stood up, straightening her skirt and brushing imagined dust off her sleeve. She looked up at the sky. “It is going to rain, Mma. At long last it is going to rain.”

  Mma Ramotswe glanced over her shoulder at the clouds that had built up to the east. They were heavy and purple, stacked in towering layers; so sudden, so welcome. “Yes,” she said. “That is very good. The land is very thirsty.” She reached out and touched the woman’s shoulder. “But tell me one thing, Mma, and then we will leave you to get on with your…with your resting. Tell me, was it true that this girl was the child of another lady?”

  The woman laughed. “Certainly not, Mma. It is certainly not true.”

  “Can you be sure?” Mma Ramotswe probed.

  Again the woman laughed. “Can I be sure, Mma? Of course I can. I can be sure because I was there in the house when she gave birth. We had been friends since we were girls, and I helped her when she had her baby. It was myself and the woman from the village who helped at births. We were both there, and some other women too. All the women together. I saw that girl come out of her mother. I saw it myself.” She looked at Mma Ramotswe; there was something triumphant about her manner, the look of one who had laid a canard to rest. “And I’ll tell you something else, Mma. I saw the baby open her eyes for the first time—I was right there, as close as I am to you—and I saw the look in those eyes. It was a complaining look, and I said to myself, This one will do a lot of shouting. And, do you know, Mma, straightaway that baby started to cry and make a fuss about being born. That is the sort of baby she was.”

  THEY LEFT THE WOMAN, but only after she had given them a list of other friends of the late Mma Sebina, senior. None of these women knew her as well as she did, of course, but she was sure that they would confirm what she had told them. And then, with the storm clouds now virtually upon them, they made their way back to the tiny white van.

  “We can’t go and look for these people in the rain,” said Mma Ramotswe, glancing up at the purple clouds. “We shall have to come back.”

  “We shall have to come back,” agreed Mr. Polopetsi, who had a habit of repeating what was said to him; an innocuous enough habit, until one noticed it.

  Mma Ramotswe turned the van and they had just started back when the first drops of rain began to fall. First there was that smell, that smell of rain, so unlike anything else, but immediately recognisable and enough to make the heart of a dry person soar; for that, thought Mma Ramotswe, is what we Batswana are: dry people, people who can live with dust and dryness but whose hearts dream of rain and water. Now, in great veils, the rain fell upon Botswana; great purple-white veils joining sky to land, soaking the parched landscape.

  They drove down the road through the welcome deluge, travelling slowly for the puddles and sheets of water that were forming so quickly. The tiny white van, valiant in every sort of condition, ploughed through the water like an albino hippo, while its windscreen wipers swept backwards and forwards, making it possible, just, to see a few yards ahead through the downpour. But then, as if overcome by the sheer effort of pushing aside so much water, the wipers collided with one another and became stuck. Immediately Mma Ramotswe and Mr. Polopetsi were as if shrouded in a completely impenetrable mist.

  “I cannot carry on driving if I cannot see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We shall have to stop.”

  She drew the van to the side of the road, or to what she hoped was the side of the road; it was impossible to see even that.

  Mr. Polopetsi rubbed at the steam on the passenger window with the sleeve of his jacket. “I will get out and fix those, Mma,” he said. “They are just stuck.”

  Mma Ramotswe made a clucking sound with her tongue. “You don’t need to do that, Rra. You will get soaked. Wait until it eases a bit.”

  Mr. Polopetsi peered through the small circle he had cleared in the condensation. “It will not clear quickly. This rain is going to go on for some time. I do not mind a bit of nice warm rain, Mma.” He turned to grin at her. “Why should I mind that? We have waterproof skins, do we not, Mma? Is that not what God has given us?”

  He reached for the door lever and flung the door open. She felt the rain come in as he got out of the van, and then he slammed the door closed again. She saw him grappling with the windscreen wipers, which were recalcitrant. But eventually he freed them and they sprang back into operation again, describing their squeaky arcs in the still heavy rain.

  When Mr. Polopetsi clambered back into the van his outer clothing was soaked.

  “Look at your jacket, Rra,” she said. “You must take it off. Your shirt will be drier underneath.”

  Mr. Polopetsi was stoic. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I shall get dry soon. Let’s just go back now.”

  Mma Ramotswe felt that she had to insist. She could see that his shirt was damp, but had not been soaked as thoroughly as his jacket. “No,” she said, starting to tug at the neck and shoulders of the jacket. “Come on now, take it off.”

  He sighed. “If you insist, Mma Ramotswe. If you insist.”

  She smiled and continued to help him wriggle out of the jacket. “It is for your own good, Rra. Women know about these things.”

  The jacket was off his shoulders and she gave it a shake, constrained by the small cabin of the van, but enough to get some of the moisture out. As she did so, an envelope fell out of the pocket.

  “A letter,” she said. “I hope it is not wet.”

  The letter had fallen on her lap, and she picked it up.

  “Oh, it has my name on it,” she said. “Look. Mma Ramotswe.”

  Mr. Polopetsi had become quite still. She heard his breathing, which sounded strange, as
if he had just run up a flight of stairs. She looked down at the letter in her hands. It was definitely addressed to her. She slipped a finger under the flap and opened it.

  Fat woman beware! You think that you are Number 1, but you are Number Nothing!

  She read the letter in disbelief, in confusion. It was on the same paper as the last one; it was by the same hand. She looked up. Mr. Polopetsi was staring at the letter.

  “I found it in the garage. I picked it up and was going to give it to you.”

  She looked again at the piece of paper. Outside, it seemed as if the rain had intensified; there was an insistent drumming on the roof of the van. Watery sounds. “Found it?” she asked. “Where?”

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said, “I found it on one of the oil drums. You know that one by the side. Somebody must have left it there. It is a wicked letter, Mma. It is from some stupid person who doesn’t know what he’s writing.”

  Mma Ramotswe folded the letter up carefully and tucked it into her pocket. “You said he, Rra. Why did you say he? Why do you think this letter is from a man?”

  Again he hesitated before replying. “Because the writers of such letters are usually men,” he said. “It is the sort of letter that a stupid man writes.”

  She looked ahead and engaged the van’s gears slowly, tentatively, as if she was pondering something. “You didn’t know what was in it, did you, Rra?” she asked, looking at him as she spoke. The tiny white van strayed from its path, towards the middle of the road.

  “Of course not, Mma,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “I would not read a letter addressed to Mma Ramotswe.”

  Or write one? she asked herself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN